The Cousin Who Comes at Christmas

There are twenty-two people in a house built for eight and the kitchen is the only room anybody actually wants to be in, which is how it has always been and how it will always be.

Marcia is at the sink. She is forty-five. She has been at that sink, on and off, for about two hours, and she has washed things that did not need washing, and she is entirely content, and she is not in the room.

She would dispute that. She would say she is here, is she not, she came, she brought the two big dishes, she has been on her feet since eleven. And every word of that is true and none of it touches what her sister could tell you in one sentence, which is that ten years ago something changed in the way Marcia stands in this kitchen.

Not judgment. Marcia has never said a word against a soul in this family. It is something quieter than that and harder to name, a kind of careful daylight between her and everybody, an inch of glass, a permanent low readiness to be somewhere else. She laughs slightly after everybody else. She is the first to start clearing.

She got serious about God ten years ago and it is real and it holds, and somewhere in the first year she began, without deciding, to stand in this kitchen like a guest.

At about four the door goes and it is Delroy.

Delroy is the cousin who comes at Christmas. He is a great deal. He is loud, he is late, he has a bag of gifts he clearly bought this morning, and he comes through that door hugging. He hugs the aunties, he hugs the boy who is nearly six foot and hates it, he hugs Marcia's sister and lifts her about an inch off the floor, and the whole kitchen is shouting at him.

He gets to Marcia at the sink.

And he puts out his hand.

He does it warmly. He does it with a big smile. He is not making a point and he would be horrified to know he was making one, because he is not thinking at all; his body has simply learned, over ten Christmases, what this particular cousin is.

Marcia dries her hands and shakes it.

And standing there with her own cousin's hand in hers in her own aunt's kitchen, she sees the whole ten years at once.

You have been at that sink. Your kitchen might be a table, or a group chat, or a phone that rings twice a year. But you know the inch of glass, and you know when it went up, and you have never once called it what it is.

The sanctifier and the sanctified are all of one

Hebrews 2 is arguing something enormous, which is that the Son took our nature on purpose, and in the middle of the argument there is a sentence about what sanctifying actually does to the relationship.

For both he that sanctifieth and they who are sanctified are all of one: for which cause he is not ashamed to call them brethren.Hebrews 2:11

All of one. That is the direction of the whole thing. The setting apart in that verse does not put distance between the One doing it and the ones it is done to. It binds them. It makes them one company, and the writer says so before he says anything else.

You have been made one with Him by the very act of being set apart, and it did not put an inch of glass anywhere. That is the written word and not my read on your Christmas, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes an argument from the letter to the Hebrews and sets it down at a kitchen sink with the pots still going.

And then look at the proof the writer offers. For which cause he is not ashamed to call them brethren.

That is the evidence. Not a doctrine. A behavior. The way you can tell that the sanctifying joined rather than separated is that He claims the family out loud, in public, in front of everybody, without lowering His voice.

Now hold your ten years against that measure. Not against a rule, because this site does not write rules. Against that one sentence: not ashamed to call them brethren.

He went toward the kinship, not away from it

Three verses later the writer says it again in the plainest possible terms. Forasmuch then as the children are partakers of flesh and blood, he also himself likewise took part of the same.

Took part of the same. He moved toward the family. That is the whole direction of the incarnation and it is the exact opposite of the direction a person drifts when they mistake holiness for daylight.

This is yours, and the movement in it is toward your people and never away, and it is already settled. Hebrews 2 says he took part of the same in so many words, and the same Spirit who inspired that letter is the one making it a present fact in a woman drying her hands on a dish towel.

I will guard it, because I am not asking you to be somebody you are not. There are things in that kitchen you do not do any more and you should not do them, and there are conversations you will not join and you are right not to join them, and nobody here is telling you to go back to who you were at thirty-five. That is not the ask.

The ask is about the inch of glass, which is a separate object from any of that. You could stop every single thing you stopped and still hug Delroy at the door. The two are not connected. They only feel connected because they arrived in the same year.

And this family is not on trial either. They have not shut you out. They have adapted, which is what people do, and Delroy's hand came out because his body learned something from you, not from them.